How to fix stuck Mac OS X clipboard – won’t copy/paste anything new

Something has been bugging me with OS X for a while — sometimes the OS X clipboard (officially known as “pasteboard”) gets stuck and won’t accept any new ‘copied’ content. Instead, when you ‘paste’ in any app, the clipboard always pastes back the last thing you successfully copied.

One solution to this is to reboot the Mac, but since Mac OS X is generally so stable and doesn’t need to be periodically rebooted as a matter of course, rebooting a machine with many open apps and windows can be a hassle.

Searching for this issue online provides a lot of bad advice (one website I saw said “repair permissions and if that doesn’t work, reinstall the OS”… terrible advice.)

Other websites incorrectly advise to kill the PBS process and restart it.

Apple’s manual page for PBS notes it is not related to the Pasteboard process. Instead, the correct process to kill is PBoard.

Hello,
It’s not working for me either. The interesting thing is that I can copy-n-paste between SOME apps only. For example: Firefox & Terminal. Unfortunately, the drag between Finder windows is not working. No idea, what’s wrong, but I see this on regular basis.

This process didn’t work for me, but until I found this post, I thought I was losing my mind. I can’t paste between Pages (5.6.2) documents. Running 10.10.5. The last copied item was a URL from Firefox (not Chrome).

I have tried all the suggestions noted and still have been unable to copy and paste from one application into Word or notepad. I can copy and paste or cut and paste within Word however. Where it not for my iPad Pro I would be unable to continue working at all.

I have struggled with this exact same issue for months. It is time apple fixed it – there are days where I cannot copy and paste anything ….the same thing is stuck in the memory until I reboot the computer – soemthing I do not like to do as it causes me to have to close a dozen operations.
this is such a basic thing I cannot understand how it cannot be permanently fixed.

The above didn’t fix mine, either. THIS FIXED MINE:
Using Copy or Cut to Delete the Clipboard
Highlight any text on any window on the Mac, including a TextEdit document, words on a Web page or even the title of a file in Finder. To take up as little memory in the clipboard as possible, you can highlight a single letter, a space between two words or a punctuation mark.

Press “Command” and “C” at the same time on the keyboard to copy the text to your clipboard. This deletes any text that was in the clipboard and replaces it with what you just copied.

Press “Command” and “X” to cut the text on an editable document instead of copying it if you want to ensure that you cleared the clipboard successfully. Without moving the cursor, immediately press “Command” and “V” to paste the text back exactly where it was. This illustrates that the clipboard contains the text you just copied without altering your document.
credit: AZCentral http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/delete-text-mac-clipboard-23087.html